[aidanf]

This is nonsense. Taxi services are regulated for good reason. Many cities and countries have well-regulated transparent taxi industries.

Uber often seems to seek to bypass that regulation because, eh, disruption. I would expect any city to do something when faced with a private corporation attempting to flout their laws for profit. Doing so is in no way correlated with any measure of how corrupt that city is.

[arturhoo]

Well, as a brazilian, his statement sounded very true to me. I'll try no to generalize as much as he did and tell the story from our perspective.

Taxi drivers and politicians in Brazil are fighting Uber because they are losing slices of a pie that is deeply corrupted. A single person (most of them are politicians or friends with city councilmen) hold hundreds of Taxi Plates and "rent" them to ordinary drivers that obviously can't have their own plates because they're not fairly distributed and even if they were, would be prohibitively expensive. So these ordinary drivers start their working days owing R$200 to the plate holders, resulting in a service that has the customer safety, comfort, etc as the last priority.

We do have laws and regulations but it'd be naive to think they benefit the passengers. One of them requires the cars to be inspected every six months, which would be a nice thing, except these inspections are only another way for the abovementioned politicians/government have more money to be diverted - some cars are ridiculously filthy and poor maintained.

When Uber arrived last year it was indeed a disruption: polite drivers, well maintained cars, fair service. The so called inspections happen in real time through in app reviews by the people who are supposed to be protected after all - the passengers.

As the only city councillor to vote in favor of Uber in Sao Paulo well said: "it was a massacre", corruption is so evidently high that not even a discussion took place about how the things Uber does right could be incorporated into the existing Taxi ecosystem. And pg's statement fits right in: politicians fought so ferociously to ban Uber (faster than many other agendas that are crucial to Brazil) that it becomes a picture of how corrupt they are.

To complete, I think that services that try to disrupt existing services are good to take us to the opposite side of a sine wave - they come to draw our attention of to things we were probably overlooking. Honest cities and politicians will take the opportunity to bring the good things into discussion, corrupt ones will ferociously try to suppress it.

Although a disproportional comparison, I remember when I visited one of the post offices in my city as a kindergarten student in the late 90s - the manager that was taking us through the guided visit was very anxious of how emails were driving the telegram usage down.

[slowmotiony]

In warsaw, about 90% percent of the drivers will try to fuck you. Be it by refusing to give you a receipt, taking longer ways, asking a price taken out of their arses or just straight up lying to you to get your money, especially if you're a foreigner.

Most of them drive like complete idiots and break numerous rules even during a simple 10 minute ride.

So my question is what does taxi regulations do exactly? Because it seems like it's not working.

[bobcostas55]

>Taxi services are regulated for good reason.

You can't just leave us hanging, what reason is it? Why does the taxi driver cartel deserve economic rents at the expense of everyone else?

[prostoalex]

If you were to design a taxi system from scratch you'd probably want to have

* increased levels of insurance to cover passengers and their belongings

* rigid maintenance requirements on the vehicles that do get more wear & tear through commercial usage

* background checks on drivers, not as much as molester/criminal type that the press likes to sensationalize, but just driving record - obviously someone who keeps running red lights, gets speeding tickets, gets into road rage and runs over people should spend less time on the road, not more

* once you've figured those requirements out, a third party needs to enforce the rules and be able to shut off the offending drivers

Most likely candidate for a third party is a government agency. Most likely process for approving/forbidding someone from entering the field of commercial transportation is licensing.

If there are better ideas that would lead to increase in public safety and decrease in bad guys abusing the system just to turn a quick buck, those are certainly worth discussing.

[mckoss]

Taxi services are primarily regulated at the behest of the existing taxi companies to keep out competition. The public interest of the regulation is just a cover story.

We just returned from Paris, and I can tell you that people in Paris are not happy with cab drivers (overpriced, and often refuse riders based on too many people, too many bags, or too short of a trip).

This smells like a campaign of a greedy and corrupt union hiding behind a law to protect its poorly performing industry.

[mhw]

> The public interest of the regulation is just a cover story.

It's a single data point, but crimes committed by the drivers of unlicensed cabs in London are a big enough problem for there to be awareness campaigns like this one: <https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/be-cabwise>. Example of the kind of criminal activity that regulation is trying to deter: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22998900>.

[ousta]

taxis services are regulated for good reason yes. but it doesn't mean the regulation is efficient. when you pay for a service that provides you exactly the same experience than a discounted service like Uber then there is no sense for this service.

Taxi drivers in france is expensive and drivers are uneducated, rude, unpolite. Compare this to drivers in england and japan where they respect the customer and provide a good service and then you will understand why uber disrupting french taxis. because the regulation is only based about how much money you need to put to buy a license while the regulation should be about having a proper formation and learn about customer service.

[jacalata]

So if Uber is disrupting French taxis because the drivers are rude and English taxi drivers are polite then why is Uber catching on in England too?